We Are Not Making This Up Dept. - I.

Once again the wildly popular "We Are Not Making This Up Dept." department of Intergalatic Source of Truth . . . . Wait! No one has ever heard of this department of IST. Ok, ok. No one has ever hear of IST!

ok. Forget it.

Check out that a certain Sheik [!] ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Bin ‘Abdillah Bin Baz, in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa in 1966 that THE EARTH IS FLAT.

Well, kiss my kefiyah, girls. These pixels never lie. And this guy went on to be the Grand Mufti, the HIGHEST RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY in Swordly Irapeya. And the great Kingdom of Saud didn't bat an eye over what he'd said and . . . and . . . Sheikh Bin Baz's pronouncements are still treated as authoritative by the Swordly government.

There's much more. The following is about the garbage distributed in the U.S. and around the world by the Saudis through the mosques they support:

A prolific source of fatwas condemning “infidels” in this collection of literature was Sheik ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Bin ‘Abdillah Bin Baz (died 1999), who was appointed by King Fahd in 1993 to the official post of Grand Mufti. As Grand Mufti, he was upheld by the government of Saudi Arabia as its highest religious authority. Bin Baz was a government appointee who received a regular government salary, served at the pleasure of the King and presided over the Saudi Permanent Committee for Scientific Research and the Issuing of Fatwas,^[1] an office of the Saudi government. His radically dichotomous mode of thinking, coupled with his persistent demonizing of non-Muslims and tolerant Muslims, runs through the fatwas in these publications.

Bin Baz is famously remembered by many Saudis for a ruling he issued in 1966 declaring the world flat. He was also responsible for the fatwa, unique in Islam, barring Saudi women from driving. Perhaps as a way of atoning for a fatwa he reluctantly issued in 1991 at the time of the Gulf War accepting the presence of non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia, in subsequent years Bin Baz seemed to go out of his way to pronounce against Christians, Jews, and “infidel” Westerners. His fatwas, which carry considerable weight, have been circulated through official Saudi diplomatic channels to mosques and schools throughout the world, including some in the United States, and have been particularly influential in radicalizing Muslim youth at home and abroad. The extremist views proclaimed in these official fatwas belie what Adel al-Jubeir, the articulate Saudi spokesman and special advisor to Crown Prince Abdullah, asserts during televised press conferences about fanatical sheiks in the Kingdom being mainly "underground," and the fatwas they issue being merely expressions of “their personal opinions.” Though Bin Baz is now dead, his fanatical fatwas continue to be treated as authoritative by the Saudi government.

Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques, Center for Religious Freedom, 2005, pp. 4-5 [emphasis added].

It sure makes you want to sit up and take notice next time you hear that some "sheikh" has got something on his mind. And if an honest to Allah fatwa of this caliber can issue from the freaking Pope of Swordly Irapeya, it sure suggests that any other fatwas you hear about aren't worth the spittle they're written in.

Notes
^[1] SPCSRIF Fatwa # 1967-Physics-23,954.2(a). Double gravity mandatory for infidels.